Relevate Health bets on the right moment

A pharmaceutical company can buy a physician’s attention and still miss the useful moment. The doctor might be learning about a disease, seeing a patient, or trying to work out whether insurance covers a treatment. Those are three different problems. Relevate Health has spent its history making a business out of the differences.

The client that got too big

Jeff Spanbauer and Scott Weintraub started Healthcare Regional Marketing in 2007. Their premise was straightforward: a national pharmaceutical brand could perform very differently from one local market to another. A uniform campaign left those differences to the sales force. They believed local data could do more of the work.

Then came the sort of customer an agency dreams about. Pfizer hired the company after reorganizing around local markets. In a 2023 interview, Spanbauer recalled staffing rising from about 25 people to 80, with Pfizer accounting for roughly 80% of the work between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, Pfizer cut spending following another restructuring. Layoffs followed.

“Healthcare is local”

Jeff Spanbauer · founder interview, 2023

The failure was in the customer mix. In a separate podcast conversation, Spanbauer described revenue falling from about $15 million to $6 million. That is the uncomfortable arithmetic behind a familiar agency temptation: the client that makes growth easy can also make the business fragile.

Spanbauer also described a management habit that costs less than an acquisition: colleagues nominate one another for recognition at town halls. The company calls its values P.A.C.T. - pioneering, accountable, caring and transparent. Giving those words a recurring place in meetings makes them easier to act on than a framed office poster.

Two appointments with the same doctor

Today, the company organizes its offering around two occasions: the point of learning and the point of clinical decision. That distinction gives an otherwise sprawling marketing business a useful shape. A physician watching an expert discussion needs a different experience from one checking treatment options during a patient encounter.

Relevate sells the planning and execution needed to reach both. Its services include market analysis, brand positioning, creative development, access strategy and campaign delivery. Its proprietary ELE Decision Engine brings together audience information and clinical signals to guide whom to contact, what to show and where to show it. OMNI KNOW-HOW is the company’s name for coordinating those capabilities.

This places Relevate between a healthcare agency, a data business and a specialist engagement platform. A buyer could assemble separate suppliers for those jobs. Relevate’s argument is that intelligence and delivery become more useful when they work together. The commercial offering is a business service for brand teams, with technology supporting the work.

Please play with the evidence

The acquisition trail explains how the offering grew. Arteric added digital and analytics capabilities. Axon Communications brought video-based education and products for field teams. ConneXion360 added an HCP recruitment network and messaging services. Each deal supplied another way to identify or reach a healthcare professional.

The more surprising purchase arrived in September 2024: the pharmaceutical and life sciences division of Level Ex, acquired from Brainlab. Relevate had bought a medical video game business. The division became Relevate Health Games in August 2025, with Level Ex founder Sam Glassenberg leading it.

A game gives the clinician something to do with information. Relevate offers mechanics around diagnosis, treatment, patient identification and clinical data. They can appear in a conference booth, on a website or during a peer program. Instead of merely showing a study endpoint, a program can ask participants to work toward revealing it.

In its rebranding announcement, the studio reported ten new games in the first half of 2025. It also introduced Level One for newly diagnosed Type 1 diabetes patients and caregivers. The unusual detail is who built this capability: Glassenberg’s earlier career included Star Wars games at LucasFilm. The audience changed; the attention problem remains recognizable.

The prescription has a second audience

Learning about a therapy does not settle whether a patient can obtain it. Coverage introduces another set of local differences. In September 2026, Relevate and Flora Health announced a co-developed offering that puts context-specific formulary information inside electronic health record workflows.

The logic is practical. Coverage information can change, and a physician’s previous experience may be outdated. Surfacing refreshed information while a treatment is being considered can help identify access questions earlier. The partnership connects Relevate’s intelligence and delivery capabilities with Flora’s workflow connectivity. It turns an abstract promise of relevance into a specific question: can this patient get this medicine?

Count the decision, then ask why

Scale is part of the sales case. Relevate says it serves more than 185 brands and delivers over 600 campaigns annually. Its historical client roster includes brands from AstraZeneca, Janssen, Pfizer, Sanofi and EMD. Mountaingate invested in 2020 and announced its exit in August 2026; subsequent industry reporting identified Linden as the buyer.

The harder question is performance. An October 2026 company analysis reported that median lift across EHR campaigns, with stronger results among campaigns using more targeting rules. These are vendor-reported commercial findings. Prescription lift measures prescribing behavior; it does not establish improved patient health. The association also leaves buyers with useful questions about controls, campaign selection and which rules mattered.

A useful brief can start with three questions. What does the clinician need to understand? What prevents action after understanding? Where does that obstacle actually appear? A learning problem might call for an expert explanation or a game. An access problem might call for coverage information. Keeping those jobs distinct gives a buyer a more demanding way to evaluate a supplier than counting the number of channels on its capabilities slide. It also makes the measurement discussion more specific.

For a marketing team, the copyable move is to separate learning needs from treatment needs, then build content for each. Its usefulness depends on access to the relevant workflow, current information and a real clinical reason for the message. More precise delivery cannot rescue an irrelevant claim. Relevate’s most interesting wager is that knowing when to speak can make the work worth hearing.